Alpha of the new Phong Bumpmap interface, with a custom widget

JL VT pentalis at gmail.com
Fri May 20 00:54:29 CEST 2011


I really wanted to finish this before the Krita Sprint, but I'll have to do
with showing people the (pre-alpha) prototype, since I want to talk about
this in the sprint!.

This is the old Phong Bumpmap GUI
http://pentalis.org/kritablog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Phong-Bumpmap-GUI.png
http://pentalis.org/kritablog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Phong-Bumpmap-GUI-2.png

Functional, but ugly.
Long dialogue with a graphic designer friend led me to think of the GUI as
more than just part of the program, but as something _basic_ that will
define whether your program is perceived as good or bad. The more powerful
the GUI, the more powerful the program will be perceived to be, even if its
actual capabilities are exactly the same.

So I set out to make a really powerful GUI for PhongBumpmap, something so
easy to use, intuitive and powerful that can make the user go "Wow!" and
understand immediately, with just the GUI, all that can be done with this
filter.

Users can almost have the impasto effect with just the PhongBumpmap filter
as it is now, so, my goal is to give it a presentable GUI that doesn't make
it look like it can't really do anything.

For that I need to create an actual stage with lights to show the user WHERE
really the lights are coming from, for that I made the LightStage class with
its LightSource companion, both classes make the stage, you can play with
those in this alpha, they're almost complete, and look pretty.

The final GUI is something I debated with that GUI-oriented friend (as
opposed to command-line oriented) and settled upon a design that I will
present in the sprint, for now, enjoy the tease. Sending this file is
actually a way for me to back this up in case my computer suddenly explodes
before I can make the final commit to the remote repository  =)

To remove lights they must be selected first, to select them, click on them
(slightly buggy at the moment), and then press Remove Light. All selected
lights will be removed, but the final design should have every LightSource
working as a radio button: only 1 light can be selected at a time. Such
light's properties will be finely editable using the Double Spin boxes and a
(currently not present) KColorDialog change the color, currently this
feature is not implemented.

Lights can be moved by pressing the mouse and dragging them over the Light
Stage, they can't be dragged outside. The stage represents an hemisphere,
the "distant sky" where the lights are located; dragging them over the X, Y
coordinates represents actually a 3D movement over the surface of this
hemisphere, thus changing the Azimuth (currently not beautified to present
it to the user) and the Altitude in the list of lights located to the right.
The color of the icon of these items represent the color of the
corresponding light at the coordinates listed.

Well, this is all the sneak peak for now,
see you all in the Sprint!.


PD: I couldn't include the executable file since it was too heavy for the
mailing list, however, the project can be easily built using QMake or from
inside Qt Creator, available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
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